Charles Jonnart its new president in 1920. Known as the PRDS, the Alliance professed its willingness to co-operate with the Radical-Socialist Party. The party became the backbone of government including the Radical-Socialist Party following the fall of the Cartel des Gauches. Nevertheless, the Alliance could not get the Radicals to rally around a centrist party, the opposition crystallizing around the issue of secularism, the intervention of the state or in terms of foreign policy (contrast between Aristide Briand and Raymond Poincaré). Decline Pierre-Étienne Flandin took the chair of the Alliance in 1933 with the aim to reorganize the party in a way which Louis Marin had done ten years earlier with the Republican Federation. Until then a grouping more than a party, the Alliance became a party which established a hierarchy and became more centralized. The party expanded its regional structures and increased the number of member to about 20,000 in 1936. Flandin's leadership marked the end of the Alliance's overtures to the Radicals. However, the Alliance was torn on the doctrinal front. Common ground on the base of the defense of institutions, the middle class and the rejection of the extremes disintegrated due to divergent views adopted by the personalities of the Alliance, namely those of Pierre-Étienne Flandin around the group of Republicans of the Left, those of René Besse around the Independents of the Left and those of Paul Reynaud and André Tardieu around the Republican Centre. These divergences were apparent during the Léon Blum government where Alliance members ranged from moderate support of the laws of the left-wing Popular Front, the division of the party was sensitive by 1938 between a pacifist majority (Flandin) supporting the Munich Agreement and the hawkish minority (Reynaud) opposing the Agreement . More profoundly, this division also reflected the significant oppositions within the party concerning the reform of the state and institutions between 1933 and 1934. Since then, the Alliance struggled to maintain a centrist position in a Republic no longer managed by the centre. It became on the contrary a party which showed the different opinions chosen by the men from the Republican and parliamentary rights to address the social and political crises of the thirties. Doctrine The Democratic Alliance was a centre-right party which occupied between 1901 and 1940 a central position on the political spectrum and this despite the iron rule of French politics developed by René Rémond which